Copper-skinned, they call her, and say under their breath that she has eyes like blue opal. That her build is as sharp as the edge of a knife. Beautiful. Dangerous. Snakelike, in more ways than one. The stories vary in some ways, but not many. Is her necklace a branch or a bone?
Anyway, O wants to meet her.
It’s been a long time since she’s visited Denocte. A long, long time. Nothing about it feels familiar at first. It is far too hot, for one, not in the dry, seething way of the desert, but a humid, oppressive warmth built up from far too many bodies pressed far too close together. There are too many streetlights; this deep in the city, she can barely see the stars. The air is too heavily scented, thick with the perfumes of flowers and alcohol. There are too many people. Too many bustling crowds. Too much of this, and this, and this and this. Too much everything everywhere.
The moon is a thin sliver in the sky, like the curve of a scythe. O slinks through the crowded streets and counts the noises of her hooves on the cobblestone: one-two, one-two, one-two. She does not know quite where to look, does not know quite who to ask.
For the first time in a long time she thinks of her father, and how that smell that has so overtaken her is really the smell of him—jasmine, tobacco smoke, warmth not quite like the sun-warmth of the desert. And now she looks and realizes that he is everywhere: in the air strung with the songs of harps and violins, in the stained-glass windows, the happy, laughing eyes of the fire-breathers on the streets, the chest-deep drumbeats rumbling through the streets. The lantern-glitter on the cobblestone. The crackling energy in the air, almost but not quite electricity.
For the first time in a long time she thinks of her father, and her heart hurts.
Her mother is here, she knows. And Aghavni, hidden away somewhere in the alleys, silent and deadly like the spider she is. One of them must know something.
O does not knock on the door of the Scarab or wait to be let in. She has come by often enough that the patrons recognize her, that the guards at the door now look at her with uneasy recognition instead of complete and total suspicion. So she does not knock—just pushes her way through the narrow doors, squeezing through the muscled bodies of the men on the steps, choosing to disregard the way the watch her, like a pack of wolves following a limp deer.
Oh, she thinks—smirks—you have no idea.
As always, the ground-level room smells like smoke and expensively scented oils. It is dimly lit and full of sound—music, laughter, growls. As always, it is packed with gamblers and royals with their masks on and the servants in the sapphire blue suits, and O surveys them with one carless, half-narrowed eye as she climbs the carpeted steps to the second floor. Slowly, the patrons become smaller and smaller, until they could be quashed beneath her one foot. Slowly O leaves them behind and moves toward the lounges.
Through the doorway: music. Hoofsteps softened by plush velvet. There is the low murmur of voices, even more numerous than usual.
Perhaps, she thinks, today is the chosen day. Perhaps every sinner in Novus has chosen tonight to come and confess their lives to all the other sinners. Perhaps today she will be lucky enough to find the thing she wants to find.
Before entering the lounge, O carefully dons a set of sapphire blue robes. Covers her face with a blue silk mask. She wears a sharp, sweet smile, like a good girl. She keeps her axe tucked away at her hip.
She moves toward the copper-skinned girl at the edge of the room, and pretends not to be nauseated at the sight of Solterra’s ruination, sitting just across from her and shifting like quicksilver in the faint light.
It's about time that we set it off Red lights, I could never stop
She is there where she always is, a home that wasn't home, an establishment that drew more bad than good--but really how different from that was she herself? There was no other place she frequented more often, a room in the corner at the end of the long hall designated for open rooms waiting to be claimed stamped with her symbol of a red rose. It was hers, and sometimes it saw the likes of those she considered worthy enough of sharing it with her, but come nightfall it would stand empty again while she prowled the Scarab floors in search anything she could find useful.
What did she search for, out there where the grounds were too crowded to make it safely from one end to the other without any contact, where the noise either always seemed too loud or too soft to make anything out, where the secrets somehow always found their way to the surface? Why did she stay there, night after night, refusing to call it home in fact she only ever left to take outside jobs or make headway on her own projects? Why did she go back time after time into the lap of a place that cared not for whatever transpired under its roof, likely a place more dangerous should one not keep their wits about them than being the presence of a god?
Really, there was only one answer, and it lay with someone who only sent in the occasional letter instead of appearing himself.
But how stuck she was, to consider no other options for refuge. And how naive she might have been to drag her baggage into the one place everyone would know to find her. She dared them to find her.
--- --- ---
Raum had been there. She had sent him a letter and he obliged its words, followed her instructions and stepped away from Day long enough to share that space within her room. They had laughed, they had reminisced, they had disagreed, they had understood, and then they had split. It was their cycle, their style, and that time had been no different. She had heard the rumors of a rebellion, the dissent in Day becoming too great for their tyrannical King to quell, and she had feigned concern. Her pieces had always lay where she would benefit the most, and at some points in the past that had been with Raum. But time was proving the need to place that piece elsewhere, and with the rising voices Manon had to take action in a way that would protect her interests the most.
Seraphina lived; she didn't die at the hands of Raum as once thought, and Manon was already switching sides.
And so she had called on Raum to pledge her loyalty to him (for little did she reveal what she had learned and what she intended to do), and he believed her as he always had. With the rising sun they said their goodbyes with a promise to meet again, and she set about to writing her next letter intended for the once-Solterran queen.
--- --- ---
Some days or weeks after obtaining information regarding her father, she had her sights on a boy in the Dusk Court. He knew him, they told her, knew who he was and where he was hiding. Knew how to get to him. And those were not things Manon could pass up, and so she went to the boy in Dusk and feigned a sprained ankle, and after much convincing and struggling they made it to her room.
She had managed to overtake him before he could react to her clearly very healthy body, no sprains that would hold her back from passing the chloroform over his nose and gently laying him down. It was the safest place to keep him, there in her room in the Scarab, away from prying eyes where no one dared go without her invitation in.
Interrogation would begin when he was closer to waking, Erd, the one who seemed far too innocent to know her father; but who was she to question the leads handed to her?
--- --- ---
He slept soundly behind that rose-painted door, and she had slipped out to the second floor. She had other matters to attend to, so what better way to kill time than flattering and wooing the high-status men in Denocte? They fawned over her, with her copper-kissed skin and bones so fine they could cut through glass, and she allowed them her attention long enough to steal their secrets and maybe even their hearts if only for an evening.
While they downed drink after drink, laughter bubbling like her champagne, her slim frame draped over them as they wrapped themselves around her finger, she would have never noticed a girl dressed in the same shades of blues as the servers. And even if she had been quick to catch her face, it would have raised no alarms within her chest; she would not have recognized her, though other patrons might have. The girl was not someone she had met, nor paid any mind to. That might have been her very downfall that night.
Manon quickly skipped from nobleman to nobleman, keeping along the side of the room for an easy getaway should something arise. Perhaps it was the sheer air the stranger carried with her, or the fact that she didn't deviate from a path straight to the crowned woman that raised the initial alarm bells, for none of the Scarab staff dared bother her while she mingled in the lounge. A laugh that trailed off and a smile that lowly began to slip from her dark lips was the only indication that she gave that something was amiss, and with tri-colored eyes she turned to stare at the one approaching.
With a face hidden, and a body covered, Manon wondered what sort of things a mere child could be bringing that was worthy enough to interrupt her.
The Scarab lost novelty for Apolonia long ago. She has no interest in the noblemen, their strange, leery smiles, the way their eyes follow her, coarse and unselfconscious; she has no interest in the girls that hang off their arms, less than half their age, who twirl their hair and bat their eyelashes and fake their laughter, the sound of which makes O grimace. She has no interest in the trysts of married wives who think they go unseen, dragging their little boyfriends upstairs without bothering to don a mask. She has no interest in the merchants, the servants, the barkeepers, the cardsdealers…
She wants the bones. The dark and gritty, all the deals that go unseen, the things that she can use. She wants to know:
What this girl thinks she is doing, being seen in broad light with the man all of Novus has agreed to hate. And why she thinks no one will take note of it.
Oh, but perhaps Manon is like her mother—capricious to the point of ridiculousness, somehow squeezing the last dregs of a life of success from her beauty, her charm, her connections. All her life, O has wondered if that is a talent or a stroke of luck.
She is still not sure.
In her blue silk, in her slick, dark mask, O sets a drink down at the table next to Manon. The light plays strange tricks on her skin. Every moment she is a new color: copper, gunmetal, rich, dark dirt. Of course she is beautiful. Of course her eyes are gold, green, blue, silver. Of course all the men want her. How else would she get anything done?
The man whose name she will not say is sitting across from this girl, laughing and drinking and grinning, as if he does not have the blood of both a nation and its queen on his hands. O’s chest burns and scrapes; she grits her teeth, feels acid flood the back of her mouth; oh, how she’d love to take Tuchulcha from the place it trembles against her hip and—
She watches from a window on the second floor. Manon is coming down the dark-cold alley, weight held awkwardly off one foot, and a ghost is following her.
No, just a boy. He trudges diligently behind, a silvery thing with broad shoulders and two big, snowy wings folded against his short back. He looks… concerned. His brows are knitted. His eyes glint wide, almost scared. Manon does not seem particularly worried, except for her limp, which O thinks this man would be wise to at least partially suspect. She frowns, watching as the door opens and they disappear into the halls.
Silent, catlike, she steps swiftly down to follow.
It is the very earliest hours of the morning, and through the windows comes a cold, faint, blue light. She sticks carefully to the edges of the hall, where the shadows are deepest, and slinks to the landing of the stairs; now Manon and her ghost are walking down the hall to the door with the rose painted on it, which O has passed tens of times but never thought to knock on. They are only silhouettes, gold in the lamplight, cast in wax.
A step. Another. O drops her sooty head over the edge of the railing, cranes her neck to watch more closely. The door is opening, now, and the boy is following Manon into her dark room so willingly, so naive; her heart almost aches about it, a sensation which hasn’t come to her in months.
When Manon exits, she is alone, and for days afterward there is the sound of movement, banging around behind the door.
There is noise that Seraphina is alive. When O hears it, her heart trills in her chest like the beating of wings. But it is only that—noise—and she spends most of her days trying not to think of the possibility that Solterra’s queen is out there somewhere, turning her attention, instead, to selling wares from the lobby of the Scarab and discussing the rental of a real room from Aghavni.
But it is hard to ignore; the Scarab’s patrons discuss it constantly, most of them being at the forefront of Novus’ gossip, and the more time O spends in her servant disguise, the more snatches of conversation she picks up from the noblemen and barflies who eye her like a piece of meat. And Manon, well—she offers her fair share of information, whether she knows it or not.
Novus’ politicians might find it interesting, O thinks, that their advisor has gotten so bold, and so foolish.
So that night, when she sees the copper-skinned girl making her usual rounds in the lounge, she is more inflamed than usual by the smugness of Manon’s smirk, the canned quality of her laugh, the air of confidence she carries (which O is not sure she has any right to). Tonight is the night, she thinks.
Tonight she will learn real power.
Nimble, confident, she steps forward; already Manon’s strange, swirling eyes are cast on hers, and O meets them steadily as she takes a seat on a thick velvet cushion. With exaggerated casualty, she stretches out lazily over the seat, rolls her head back, flashes a crooked smile.
